The grounding of the 737 Max will almost certainly affect Southwest Airlines, the dominant carrier at Mitchell, with about 42 percent of the air travel market in Milwaukee.

Southwest operates 34 of the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft that have been grounded. That's only a fraction of the more than 750 other Boeing 737s that are not grounded and make up the Dallas-based airline's fleet.

“Our goal is to operate our schedule with every available aircraft in our fleet to meet our customers' expectations during the busy spring travel season,” the airline said in a statement.

Southwest has 20 flights from Milwaukee to Florida for at least the next two Saturdays. Many of those flights are sold out.

Other airlines also offer flights to Florida from Milwaukee, but none of them on the scale of Southwest.

Southwest said it is doing its best to work with travelers as a result of the grounding of the aircraft.

"Currently, we are offering flexible accommodations through Sunday, March 31," the airline said in a statement on its website. "Due to high call volumes and extended hold times, we strongly encourage customers to cancel, rebook, and check flight status at southwest.com."

“Any customer booked on a canceled Max 8 flight can rebook on alternate flights without any additional fees or fare differences within 14 days of their original date of travel between the original city pairs,” according to a statement from the airline.

Travelers with spring break reservations on Southwest should watch the airline’s website for additional information.

The airlines are no doubt scrambling to shuffle schedules and assign aircraft in their fleets. But cancellations are all but inevitable when you pull aircraft out of a fleet that is generally flying at or near capacity.

"The airlines will go through their schedules and they will cancel flights," as a result of the grounding of the Boeing aircraft, said Jay Sorensen, president of IdeaWorks, an airline industry consultancy based in Shorewood. "They will put together some type of plan that will have them cancel flights and they will try to minimize the impact by canceling flights with the lowest load factor."

That means the first flights to be canceled will be the ones with the fewest people booked to fly on them.

"There’s an economic desire to impact as few passengers as possible," Sorensen said.

Contact Joe Taschler at (414) 224-2554 or jtaschler@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JoeTaschler or Facebook at facebook.com/joe.taschler.1.